Party and class

Letter: Grey area or no difference?

There is a grey area between what Lenin called “bourgeois workers’ parties” or “liberal labour parties” and straightforward bourgeois parties with worker support but no organised working-class base. On that Eric Lee ( Solidarity 643 ) is right, I think. The issue was raised as long ago as the 1960s by the withered and right-wing character then of the French Socialist Party and German Social Democratic Party. Yet “a grey area” doesn’t mean “no difference”. The Democratic Party in the USA certainly draws on union officials; but the unions have no structural role in it comparable to the unions’...

The usable Gramsci

The six recent contributions I will survey here mostly seek to identify an Antonio Gramsci usable for active socialist politics amidst the welter of Gramscis around us. They construct their usable Gramscis mostly from the terms which have figured largest in the “orthodox” Gramscis since the 1950s (the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI), the Eurocommunist, and then the academic): hegemony and war of position. My case will be that active socialists can gain more from seeing Gramsci’s arguments around those terms as weak areas, and starting with stronger seams of Gramsci’s writing. Jan Norden finds...

Trotsky and “switching the points”

I agree with Eric Lee’s substantive argument ( Solidarity 593 ) that socialists must aim to reconstruct mass politics, not just hope for better “leaders”. But I think he gives a skewed picture of Trotsky’s 1938 declaration about “the crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”. Trotsky’s argument was not one about poor leadership in politics in general, for example in bourgeois governments, but a specific one about the labour movements at that time. The previous 50 years or so of educational and organising work by socialists of different sorts; of industrialisation and urbanisation; and of...

Studying Lenin's What Is To Be Done?

We'll be studying Lenin's What Is To Be Done? in the context of Lars Lih's commentary in Lenin Rediscovered , Thursdays 8pm (UTC+1) from 15 April to 27 May inclusive. Sign up on Eventbrite Zoomlink https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81679399952?pwd=WW9lRzF1M1l4VVVsWTZVOFdyTS84dz09 Study guide : click here to download as docx , and here to download as pdf . Please read the texts indicated as reading for the first session before you join the course. Schedule Session 1: Models and adversaries Reading: Extracts – German SPD model, Bernstein’s revisionism and Russian socialism before WITBD. Click here to...

"Progressive alliance" or socialist politics?

The proposed launch of a Compass Labour Network has started a new round of debate on the old idea for a "Progressive Alliance" between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

The politics of "black power": interview with Darcus Howe

A new TV drama — Guerrilla — tells the story of the British Black Panthers. Long-time black and left activist Darcus Howe, who recently died, was a founder member of the group and consultant for the show. In this interview from 1995 Howe discussed the politics of “black power” with Dan Katz. Darcus Howe: The Panthers have been grossly misrepresented in political circles. They were an intensely revolutionary organisation, the largest non-establishment political party ever to exist in America — larger than the Communist Party or any left-wing group. There were thousands of them all over the...

Workers' struggle, or "alliances across business"?

The pdf/ print version carries an abridged version of this article Where now for the Labour Party? Following election defeats and facing environmental and economic crises, many articles are asking what direction Labour should take under its new leader. On the eve of the leadership result, Neal Lawson, director of the Compass lobby group, wrote an article on Open Democracy in which he argued for what he called a new approach. Labour must pursue new "alliances" and "build capacity", he said. It must unite a range of "countervailing forces" that will "transform our country as it comes out of the...

ABCs of Marxism

A page bringing together reading and other materials related to the ABCs of Marxism series of online meetings. To be updated soon. See here for a list of introductory articles from Workers' Liberty on key issues. Session 1. What is the United Front? The idea of a "united front" was developed among the revolutionary Marxists who grouped together after the Russian revolution of 1917. It was developed further by Marxists such as Trotsky, often in opposition to Communist Parties were which stripped of revolutionary politics after Stalin's counter-revolution in the USSR. Notes on the United Front -...

Marxists and “left governments”

“We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition… Our tasks... we realise not through the medium of bourgeois governments... but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a “defence” cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit...

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